I’m moving this up from the comments on an earlier post as I think it will take more that a comment to respond to.
A commenter, Josh Caleb, says that he has “a few honest questions“. I am going to answer him as if that were true even though I am now somewhat suspect that it isn’t due to his having cited trueorigins.org, an antievolution knockoff of talkorigins.org, and because of several of his comments left in response to others.
On the one hand the ID creationist crowd wail and moan about how they supposedly face discrimination and censure (that’s what film Expelled is about), and on the other we find this sort of stuff:
Pandas Thumb reports on an article in the Washington Post that talked about the case of Nancey Murphy of the Fuller Theological Seminary:
Nancey Murphy, a religious scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said she faced a campaign to get her fired because she expressed the view that intelligent design was not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”
Murphy, who believes in evolution, said she had to fight to keep her job after one of the founding members of the intelligent design movement, legal theorist Phillip Johnson, called a trustee at the seminary and tried to get her fired.
But this isn’t the only example.
Back in the mid-1990’s Christian biochemist Terry M. Gray was tried and convicted of heresy by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for daring to suggest that humans have primate ancestors in a review… wait for it… of Phillip Johnson’s book Darwin on Trial (1991).
Fortunately Dr. Gray wasn’t put on the rack or burnt at the stake for his “heresy” (like they used to do), but he was censured and had to write a recantation.
Dr. Gray has a page on links to articles on the incident: Documents Related to the Evolution Trial in the OPC
A similar example is Christian physicist Howard Van Till, of Calvin College in Michigan had the school’s board of trustees questioning his views after he wrote in a book (The Fourth Day 1986) in which he argued that “…the stories of the Bible and science’s account of evolution could both be true” (from chicagotribune.com):
His critics on the school’s board of trustees had no interest in reconciling the religious account of creation with a naturalist explanation of how life and the universe have evolved over the ages. For years after the book’s release in 1986, Van Till reported to a monthly interrogation where he struggled to reassure college officials that his scientific teachings fit within their creed. Van Till’s career survived the ordeal, but his Calvinist faith did not. Over the next two decades, he became the heretic his critics had suspected.
Over a span of three years a conservative businessman Leo Peters ran thirty full-page ads in the Grand Rapids Press attacking Van Till for his views.
Seems they can dish it out but can’t take it; though they really haven’t had to actually take it because most (if not all) of their claims of discrimination or censure are nonsense.
A commenter made a good point regarding something I said in one of my follow-up comments in the thread after my rant on intermediate fossils that I thought I would move up here to respond to.
Oldfart: While you are at it, explain “primitive” and “advanced” traits. Since it is also often said that later is more advanced than earlier assuming some kind of “direction”.
You’re right I should clarify this.
All over the net I see people trying to defend evolution from the attacks of antievolutionists which is good. However when they do so using false or inaccurate arguments that is not so good. For example one of my pet peeves is a particular argument that I’ve seen commonly used to rebut antievolutionist claims that there is a lack of “transitional” forms in the fossil record which often goes something like this:
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, all fossils are transitional.”
Unfortunately this is simply not true. Not all individuals reproduce; nor do all species give rise to new species. In fact many (if not most) lineages in the history of life have led to dead ends. Think about it, if a fossil represents a species which did not give rise to new species, what is it transitioning to?
Of course part of the problem is the use of term “transitional fossil” since the word transitional implies that there is some certainty about specific lineages which is actually rarely the case in paleontology.
It is better to talk about “intermediate fossils” since this refers to morphological characters (facts) rather than hypothetical lineages.
For example Archaeopteryx is undeniably intermediate in form between dinosaurs and birds being a mixture of both dinosaurian and avian (and some in between) characters, this is a fact. The question as to whether or not the genus Archaeopteryx is itself ancestral to later birds would be a hypothesis which is 1) very difficult to test and 2) not one that all paleontologists who work on dinosaurs/birds necessarily agree upon.
So please, for the sake of my sanity (and for scientific accuracy), spread the word to stop claiming that all fossils are “transitional” and maybe encourage the use of the term “intermediate” instead.
End rant.
Playing Chess with Pigeons 